Chess for All Ages: My Introduction to Blogging

29 December 2008

My Introduction to Blogging

About.com released its first blog tool, 'powered by Movable Type' at the beginning of July 2003, and switched to 'powered by WordPress' in April 2006. For a long time the blog archive

Searched for http://chess.about.com/b/archives.htm

had every post on a single page, but eventually switched to a more sensible format with a separate page for each month.

The 'Internet Archive Wayback Machine' is an erratic beast. Some pages have dozens of entries for their archived copies, some pages have a single entry, and some pages have none. The previous link is a good example. Although the page /b/archives.htm existed for years, all of the pages returned by the Wayback Machine are clustered in the few months between December 2005 and March 2006.

In April 2006, About.com made a special effort to attract the attention of the blogosphere by releasing a new function that let me make a special blogroll and have it displayed on almost every page in my topic. Since I had been keeping an eye on the chess blogs since 2003, I liked the initiative and created a list of my personal favorites.

2006-04-07 Elsewhere on the Web : The Chess Blogosphere

I updated the list monthly, eventually setting a limit of 21 blogs. For reasons that aren't important here, the URL of the list changed once and is documented in the following table.

During the first month of the new function, I wrote several pieces about the chess blogosphere.

After that initial flurry of activity, when I also started Chess for All Ages, I settled into a monthly look at the chess blogs

and kept track of them on an index